Positioning is rapidly becoming a very common service in privately operated cars. Modern mobile telephones are also ever more often equipped with navigation circuitry and software so as to enable a user to navigate in traffic or monitor sports training, for instance. A particularly advanced Nokia 95 8 GB phone with a sports tracker application enables tracking routes that a person has walked or cycled, for instance, and records the route in a training diary for subsequent use. The route may even be exported into a Google®) map so as to view the route superimposed on a satellite photograph. Also other applications and services are growing around navigation. For interworking between different entities of one service or between different services, different standards or de-facto standards have been developed for exchanging location information.
For instance, there is an Internet standard RFC1876 that defines a new domain name server (DNS) resource record type for experimental purposes. This RFC describes a mechanism to allow the DNS to carry location information about hosts, networks, and subnets. Such information for a small subset of hosts is currently contained in the flat-file Unix to Unix CoPy (UUCP) maps. However, just as the DNS replaced the use of a HOSTS.TXT file to carry host and network address information, it is possible to replace the UUCP maps as carriers of location information. This RFC defines the format of a new resource record for the DNS, and reserves a corresponding DNS type mnemonic and numerical code. For instance, a section of Switzerland is shown on an interactive map from location 46.9524° N 7.4396° E with a code {{coor d|46.9524|N|7.4396|E|region:CH}}. Moreover, there are other standards which enable standardised exchange of location information such as WGS 84 or more accurately Department of Defense (DoD) World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84) and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) which define different ways to deliver co-ordinate data in computer systems. The KML uses the WGS 84 datum and can be demonstrated by following sample:
<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?><kml xmlns=“http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0”><Placemark> <description>New York City</description> <name>New York City</name> <Point>  <coordinates>−74.006393,40.714172,0</coordinates> </Point></Placemark></kml>
Various internet services make us of KML, including Flickr®), Google Earth™, Google Maps™, Google Mobile™ and Yahoo Pipes™.
The location information received from an external source may not be accurate due to inaccuracy of positioning, for instance, but generally it may be expected that the information received is reasonably reliable for common services using the location information.